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Understanding and Using the Statistics of Communication Signals

Tricorders

I’d love to be able to make a tricorder for radio-frequency energy detection and analysis.

Spock’s tricorder could do a lot of things: Detect and locate “energy sources”, perform chemical analyses of the atmosphere, record and play back video, detect “life signs,” etc.

But Bones had his own set of awesome tricorders–the medical tricorders. These could diagnose illness and injury with amazing specificity in a few seconds and with no physical contact with the patient. Recently, Qualcomm has created the X-Prize for developing a medical tricorder. Pretty cool!

I want to make a handheld device that can detect and characterize all man-made RF signals, and do it quickly, reliably, and with low expended energy. Solving the cocktail problem for radios, and then reducing it to a small, low-cost device is my strategy. I’ve been on the case for twenty years and counting …